In the summer of 1951 the Bering Sea fishermen's union strike against the Bristol Bay salmon packers signaled the end of old-time industrial labor relations there. The issues of the strike and its conduct offer a case study of deteriorating symbiosis in industrial relations, which is not untypical elsewhere in American industry. This paper concentrates on events in 1951 and 1952 at a remote cannery site on the Nushagak River as a partial microcosm of larger evolutionary consequences in American industry.

Monetary innovation, the development of new forms of money, has not received much systematic study from economic historians. This essay presents a framework for analyzing the determinants of monetary innovation and illustrates the argument by means of a sketch of monetary innovation in America from colonial times to the present.

The laws and regulations that shaped the structure of the banking industry from the Civil War to the Great Depression were strongly influenced by the banking community. In this period legal constraints on banks were weakened by competition between state and federal regulators trying to increase membership in their banking systems. The elimination of regulation was not completed, however, because the politically most powerful group in the industry, the unit banks, had an interest in preserving some regulations.

For reasons that were exogenous or predetermined, the ex ante propensity to invest out of income in the United States declined in the 1920s while the ex ante propensity to save increased. The consequent ex ante surplus available for saving drove up asset prices. Higher asset prices produced a substantial wealth effect on consumption, converting ex ante saving into ex post consumption. Output was consequently maintained at high employment. Eventually asset markets reacted to excessive price levels. Then the momentum of falling asset prices released and reinforced the weight of “surplus” saving.

The paper develops a Marxian approach to economic history utilizing some recent, far-reaching reformulations of Marxist theory. On the basis of a new specification of class structures, the approach permits a nondeterminist analysis of the interactions of class and nonclass aspects of social change.

The paper will show how the Marxian concept of class can be applied to the processes of slavery in the American antebellum South. The use of the notion of classes, and particularly the reconceptualized concepts of fundamental and subsumed class processes, provides an alternative to the received non-Marxian categories of plantation capitalism and planter hegemony. These concepts are developed and applied to Southern class conflicts over both state banking and national monetary policy. Competition among various classes is shown to have had significant influences on the nature of these conflicts.

The transition from a classless to a class society has been a major dilemma to Marxist economic historians. Using the Wolof social formation of West Africa as its historical example, this paper produces a class theoretic analysis of primitive communism. From this analysis, it is then able to show how such a transition could take place.

Capitalist relations do not develop “naturally,” nor are the preconditions for capitalism assured by the rise of markets alone. This paper takes seventeenth–century Massachusetts as a case in point. Class relations there were noncapitalist. A brief exploration of these class relations as well as their economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence will show how complex interaction between classes produced the conditions necessary for capitalism.

This paper attempts to shed new light on the proximate determinants of domestic investment in Victorian Britain by focusing on the relationship between asset markets and investment behavior. It demonstrates that Victorian investment fluctuations were associated with divergences between the valuation of installed capital as determined in asset markets and the supply price of new capital as determined in commodity markets. After showing how investment fluctuations in Victorian Britain were related to real equity prices, the paper concludes with a summary of findings on the determinants of real share prices.

Previous “new” economic history research on late Victorian Britain often assumes that technology was exogenous to British entrepreneurs. Foreign innovations were available for inspection, and if they were not found suitable, there was no way to adapt new techniques to the British situation. Alternatively, one can assert that technological failure is a key issue in any study of retarded economic performance. A test for the presence of induced innovation—an endogenous theory of technological change—is applied to the British pig iron and cotton textile industries. Results are compared to other technological studies of British and American industry.

The paper presents an estimate of the limits to British economic growth in the period 1870–1914. It is argued that in contrast to the historical experience, vigorous and effective exploitation of the technological possibiites of the period would have required the relative expansion of some sectors—most of which, like engineering, were growing in relative size in any case—and the relative contraction of others. The conservatively estimated gains from such counterfactual sectoral shifts of economic activity were found to be of the order of 25 percent to 50 percent of British GNP in 1913. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why opportunities of this magnitude were not seized.

The paper provides new evidence on the debate over the decision of the British to invest in empire in the period of 1860–1914. An examination of the flow of symbolic capital indicates that the Empire was not a major recipient until the end of the period. The largest transfers went to the “rest of the world” although a surprisingly large fraction was absorbed domestically.A study of the profits of British firms operating at home, in the Empire, and abroad shows that while the Empire was relatively very profitable in the years before 1880, domestic returns were higher from that date until the end of the Boer War. Moreover, those domestic returns were also higher than foreign from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s and again throughout the 1890s. Finally, the evidence indicates that empire returns were as high as they were only because of substantial social subsidies from the British. The imperial experience could therefore be viewed more as a redistribution of income within the United Kingdom than as a transfer from the empire to the mother country.

Taking a fresh look at the institutions of economic management in colonial India explains much about the history of the last decades of the raj. The concept of political economy—the interaction of economic forces and political choices—provides a useful approach to the study of government economic policy and practice that can give a new perspective on the history of the late British Empire as a whole.

Earl J. Hamilton's multiple theses on the price revolution, the decline of Spain, and the birth of capitalism have all placed American silver (and gold) at the forefront. This essay supports Hamilton's emphasis on the impact of New World treasure on the decline of Castile, but from a different angle. Mining profits rather than the quantity of imports supported the empire. When the profits dwindled, as was inevitable, international superiority was begrudgingly surrendered to the emerging powers of the north.

This article summarizes recent research on the agrarian depression in seventeenth-century Spain, relying primarily upon data from the provinces of Segovia and Toledo. Both regions suffered sustained losses of population and stagnation of production and failed to develop a permanent interior market structure. Due to its reliance upon sheepherding, the Segovian rural economy recovered slightly by the end of the century, but in Toledo, an economy almost entirely dependent upon grain production, demographic and economic indices were negative throughout the entire period.